So Commodore William Marvine, commanding the Gulf squadron, sent 100 men in boats under Lieut. J. H. Russell, on the night of September 13, 1861, to destroy her. In spite of the vigilance of the Confederates, they arrived near the schooner undiscovered, and were entirely successful in firing her, in spite of a determined opposition. Meantime a wave of trouble had rolled over Galveston, Texas--a wave that stirred the foreign consuls living there into an astonishing state of anger, and through their efforts it was used with some effect to misrepresent and prejudice the case of the government throughout Europe. The affair occurred on August 3, 1861. Galveston was first blockaded by the _South Carolina_, Capt. James Alden, in the latter part of June. Captain Alden “never had any intention of troubling” the people of the city further than interrupting their ocean trade, and this determination was stated to them in an official communication. Nevertheless, the Confederates erected a number of batteries in a place where any attack on them by the blockading squadron would necessarily result in throwing projectiles into the city. A glance at the map will show that Galveston is built on the northerly point of an island that forms the harbor. The city faces the bay, and there is a wide stretch of sand behind the city--that is, between the city and the sea. It was between the city and the sea that the batteries were placed. On the morning of August 3d a tender of the blockading ship was returning north from a cruise to the south end of Galveston Island. She passed within range of the batteries, and they opened fire on her. She returned the fire and reported it to Captain Alden, who “waited all day for some explanation or disavowal on the part of the authorities.” He could scarcely realize that people “could be so insane as to initiate hostilities when their town was so completely at our mercy.” At 4 o’clock no disavowal having come, he took the _South Carolina_ within a mile of the works. The Confederates opened fire on her and Alden replied with fifteen shots, after which, finding that he could not prevent the shot going into the city as well as the works, he withdrew. [Illustration: Galveston Harbor. _From “The Navy in the Civil War.”_] The next day Mr. Arthur Lynn, the British consul, gathered together the Hanoverian and Oldenburg consul, the Swiss consul, the Mexican consul; the deputy consul for Bremen, Saxony, Belgium, and Holland; the consul _pro tem._ for Electoral Hesse, and the consul for Nassau, besides representatives of some other countries, and wrote and signed the following: